Best Food Writing 2015 (33 page)

Life, on a Plate
Life, on a Plate

Leaning in Toward the Last Supper
Leaning in Toward the Last Supper

B
Y
S
ARAH
H
ENRY

From
Lucky Peach

          
Host of the blog
LettuceEatKale.com
, Bay Area freelancer (and transplanted Australian) Sarah Henry writes socially-conscious food pieces for publications such as
The Atlantic, Chow
, and
Civil Eats
. When it comes to feeding her son, Henry treasures the meals that matter, always knowing that the clock is ticking.

My son is sixteen now. The other day I tried to recall the last time he nursed and I can't. Once he started walking—finally—at fourteen months, he moved quickly to running, everywhere, all the time. There was no time to hang around tied to a tit when there was a whole world out there to explore.

There was the time, nine months earlier, when I coaxed him to try cereal, most of which he was pushing out of his mouth with his tongue. A visiting friend, a parent of two, asked: “What are you doing?” And I said: “Introducing solids.” And he shot back: “He's not interested.” The dad was correct. What did I know?

There was the time he spat beets from his mouth and sprayed them all over the kitchen cabinet in our San Francisco apartment. I suspect some of that bright pink purée is still stuck there, ossified, for all time.

There were the years of carrying sources of nourishment in little containers. Who knew when hunger might hit? It proved a surefire way to ward off blood sugar–related meltdowns. I'm still the mom who's always carrying: fruit, nuts, bars, bagels, trail mix.

There were the visits home to Australia coinciding with his phase as a serial food flinger. When they saw us coming, his aunts would put newspaper under the high chair and hope for the best. My sister tried to feed him steak once and he ran screaming from the table.

There was a more recent trip back to the motherland, four months ago, when he was the designated plate cleaner. He's happy to do his bit in the war against food waste by eating everything in sight, as many sixteen-year-old boys do.

Back in my adopted home in Berkeley, I find myself fielding his texts at dinner time. I'm making a mushroom risotto on a Saturday night, expecting him to show up and devour a dish he loves. He texts me that he and a friend are making dinner before a party. They're wilting spinach and zesting a lemon and toasting walnuts for a pasta. It's all there in the text: the specific techniques, the ingredients. This makes me smile. The risotto will keep until Sunday.

And then I think about the last supper, the one that's coming, after he goes off to college. It's still a couple of years away, but I can feel the shift already. He's still delighted to come home to a Mum-cooked meal. When he sees supper set out or gets a whiff of what's on the stove, he'll emit an appreciative groan. But the dinner-table dynamic has changed during these high school years. There's less time for lingering and chatting about the day's events. Food is becoming more about fueling up for sport, study, or social life. Age-appropriate. What might take half an hour or more to prepare, he gobbles up in ten minutes, tops.

It's into the home stretch now—another transitional time that a mother can accept with grace and good humor, or ignore, or fight at her peril. What sometimes feels like a relentless task—this constant, daily cooking for a child—will soon be over. Then what?

I'm bracing myself for that first night, when there is no hungry son to feed. It's unsettling, because family meals matter to me. After my divorce, my angry boy would sometimes say, “Two people don't make a family.” He was hurting. That first night in our new place a thoughtful gal pal delivered Cheese Board pizza. It hit the spot at our unfamiliar, smaller, dining room table. A family ritual had begun.

As a single parent who shares, I've had years of practice with the temporarily empty nest. There's the transition night when the kid is at his
dad's and I'm free to eat whatever takes my fancy. Anchovies and broccoli rabe. Scrambled eggs. A glass of wine with cheese and crackers. A glass of wine, period. Nothing at all.

When the boy returns, we get back into our regular rhythms. He's a granola or porridge person for breakfast. On lazy weekends and late-Monday-start school days, it's waffles or pancakes. He's not much of a sandwich man, but willingly takes dinner leftovers for lunch. Rice and beans. Tofu stir-fry. Big salads loaded with cheese, nuts, and seasonal produce. Other kids, he tells me, think his lunches are odd. Then they eat some and say it tastes so good.

He's always been particular about the foods he eats. I was the same, although I grew up with five siblings, so I had much less input about dinner (read: none). My Mum, a terrific cook, would want a night off from the stove. Sometimes we'd have Australian Chinese takeaway, a genre all its own. Or McDonald's. On the burger nights, I'd boil an egg. I decided in my late teens to become a vegetarian. I've skipped red meat for most of the past thirty years, though I guess technically I'm a pescetarian, who lapses in her line of work every once in a while.

My son is a devout vegetarian by choice: He's never eaten meat. He's now in a strident teenage phase. He's horrified if I tell him I tasted lamb's tongue for a story, even though he's delighted that his Mum writes about food, and enjoys the sweet and savory treats that frequently find their way onto our table, and into his belly, as a result of that gig.

I have regrets about my own limitations in the kitchen and what I haven't given him growing up. I'm not a baker. My kid won't miss his Mum's cakes and cookies when he goes off to college, though we do laugh about my attempts (he dubbed one “lumps of goodness”). Given my line of work, there's some shame in having not yet taught him how to cook. He should have better knife skills. He doesn't know how to make stock. I'm not even certain he can peel the boiled eggs he likes (seven minutes, no gray). I've let him off the hook in the cooking department. I've tried, and failed, at different points to introduce a night a week when he cooks for us both. Maybe this summer.

There's an inherent tension as you nudge a child towards independence, with the expectation that he learn to fend for himself in the
kitchen and elsewhere, especially when food is an essential way many parents express love. Guilty as charged.

After a recent evening visit to the ER—a big gash over his eye, courtesy of a baseball—I knew when we got home long past dinnertime that he'd want noodles, with just a faint dusting of Parmigiano-Reggiano, and a swig of good extra-virgin olive oil or a chunk of creamy butter. Comfort food after crisis.

His world and his palate are expanding. On a recent trip to Maui, he was thrilled to taste freshly picked pineapples, coconuts, and taro. He enjoyed street food, hole-in-the-wall joints, fancy-pants restaurants. When we returned from the trip and I asked him what he wanted for dinner he said: “Home food.” I knew exactly what he meant.

This summer, he'll head to Madrid for a month. The child who never wanted to go to sleepaway camp—because, why, and what would you eat?—is now eager to fly halfway around the world to live with a family he's never met, for an adventure on a continent he's never been to, to practice a language he'd like to master. I see a lot of flan in his near future.

I did something similar, on a much smaller scale, at the same age. A gaggle of schoolgirls from Sydney on a weeklong French-class excursion to the Pacific island nation New Caledonia. I wasn't even taking French, but they needed to boost the numbers. We landed in Nouméa, promptly met the “locals,”—including a cadre of twentysomethings of French descent—and were educated in the language of pain au chocolat, red wine, eating late, and sex. Scandalous by today's sheltered school-trip-abroad standards. It was my first exposure to anything vaguely European, and it was delicious.

My teen will be away for his seventeenth birthday. I'll make him whatever he wants on his last night at home and whatever he's craving on his first night back. Since he's a California boy at heart, produce will figure prominently. But maybe he'll come home with a new recipe repertoire and ask for something he's discovered in his travels.

My Mum died just days ago—I found out as I was writing this piece. Not totally unexpected, but also a complete shock. I've been struggling to complete the most routine tasks ever since. I don't remember the last time she cooked for me, or even exactly the last time we ate a meal
together. But I do remember preparing a plate of food for her and my father to share in the hospital last Christmas. I'd made curried eggs, an homage to my Mum, who always made them on the holidays. Hers were so creamy, with just the right amount of spice. Mine weren't nearly as good but she ate them hungrily, nonetheless.

That's the thing about last suppers. You don't always know when you're having one.

Infrequent Potatoes
Infrequent Potatoes

B
Y
E
LISSA
A
LTMAN

From
Poor Man's Feast

          
Family connections can cut both ways, as blogger/author Elissa Altman knows all too well. Her memoir
Poor Man's Feast
delves into many layers of it; her upcoming book
Treyf: A Story of Family, Food, and the Forbidden
digs even deeper. Like a family scrapbook, this essay gives us snapshots of her growing up, haunted by her mother's own food issues.

I was a particularly tiny baby; my mother didn't know that she was pregnant for six months (being unable to get her antique garnet ring off was a clue; she went to the doctor at her teenage niece's suggestion) and the diagnosis sent her into a tailspin. In a shaky picture of my parents taken by my grandmother in Carl Schurz Park, the evidence is barely noticeable: there is my mother, the East River over her shoulder and Queens behind her in the distance, her wrists so slender and lithe even in her ninth month that her charm bracelet, heavy as Marley's chain, would slide off her hand until she had a few links removed. There I am, the incontrovertible affirmation of her pregnancy, and nothing more than a minuscule bump under her pink and white cotton blouse. My mother carried me to term, almost to the day; I weighed four pounds at birth which, for scale, is more or less the size of an average supermarket chicken.

The words my mother uses to describe me as an infant:
spindly, delicate, tiny, petite, exquisite, dainty, fine-boned, wispy
. Not being one to nurse—
I would have wound up with a chest like your grandmother's
, she
says—she fed me tiny amounts of formula, botching the instructions given to her by my first pediatrician at New York Hospital. I screamed all day and all night for my first three months, until our next door neighbor in Yorkville, a gorgeous German woman with a face like Marlene Dietrich, told my mother that I was probably hungry; she instructed her to fill my bottle with thinned-out oatmeal, cut an X in the nipple, and let me eat. She did, and at last, I stopped crying. I also ballooned up like a scaled-down version of The Michelin Man.

Eventually, the oatmeal weight fell off me: like most middle class American children of the Sixties and Seventies, I was fed a regular diet of meat, chicken, fish, lamb, and, because I was almost always anemic, beef liver, which looks surprisingly like beef liver. I shuddered at its jiggling, squidgy presence; my grandmother, who cooked most of our meals, broiled it until it took on the consistency of a stiff brown sponge, and my mother served it to me on our heavy burnt umber earthenware next to two flaccid spears of canned asparagus; there was no bread at our kitchen table, no rice, no pasta, and infrequent potatoes. My mother and I drank Tab by the bucketful, going through a six pack every two days. By the time I was four, I had become an unwitting adherent to something resembling The Atkins Diet; I was so skinny that my mother shook me into my school leotards like a pillow into a pillowcase. When I went into first grade, I carried damp tuna sandwiches made on Diet White bread, which disintegrated into a dense brick of bleached mush that wrapped itself around my red plaid thermos by the time I arrived at school.

As I wrote in
Poor Man's Feast
, when my mother went off to have her hair done every Saturday, my father—not someone I would call corpulent, but certainly not thin—secreted me away for fancy lunches that were as enlightening as they were forbidden: I learned what happens when you apply a coating of egg and flour to trout, saute it in hot butter and bathe it in wine and lemon juice. I learned what happens when you slice potatoes to a filmy thinness, layer them in a shallow copper dish, and blanket them in cream. I learned what happens when you roll a crepe around warm apricot preserves and dust it with confectioner's sugar and chopped hazelnuts. And I learned to keep my mouth shut once I got home, because food was the enemy of the body.

My mother went back to work when I was eleven; my grandmother stepped in after school and fed me regular grilled cheese and bacon sandwiches, potato latkes, pizza, and, because she loved him, Arthur Treacher's fish and chips. All that food fueled my raging tennis addiction; I played it every day, for hours. My mother never noticed what I was eating because my grandmother chose not to tell her, but also because all that tennis turned my skin and bones into solid muscle. I became a swimmer and my shoulders broadened; I hit puberty and the chest that kept my mother from nursing me as an infant was suddenly mine. My mother's desperate, hysterical need for thinness, achieved by starving her teenage self in order to be the model and television singer she eventually became, was a blip on my genetic screen. My body rebelled in the most profound of ways: I was no longer skinny. As a teenager, I began to resemble almost every woman on my father's side of the family: thick-boned, solid, muscular, and zaftig enough to acquaint me with the bitter flavor of self-consciousness.

“You'll lose that chest if you drop some weight,” my mother said when I started college, as though
That Chest
was a disembodied entity unto itself, with a mind and government all its own, like Texas. At school, the freshman fifteen worked the other way for me: with everyone gorging themselves on pizza and East West lasagna at the cafeteria, I ate nothing but taco-flavored Doritos and Diet Coke in my dorm room, but only when my roommate wasn't around. I came home that October, fifteen pounds lighter.

My mother was confused and irate a few years later, when I went to work for Dean & Deluca, and attended cooking school at night: I
wanted
food in my life. I wanted to
understand
sustenance, and to find that almost spiritual connection that comes from feeding your
self
, and others, thoughtfully and well. I wanted to re-create a family table of goodness and peace, where food was not the devil, and it didn't have to be hidden.

My body responded to the stress of her furious consternation with uncanny irony: surrounded as I was by masses of food every day and night, the pounds fell off me without my even trying to lose them. My nails went brittle and my hair thinned, and then fell out. My thyroid was off kilter and my heart rhythm wonky and I passed out twice—once in
the walk-in, once on the loading dock while signing for a Sid Wainer delivery—but man, did my body look
great
: my fat jeans were a size two, my everyday pair, a zero.

“Okay,” she said, as though I was competitively orchestrating my weight loss, “you win. You can stop now.”

Over the years, my body has settled like a house; the
Title Nine
catalog invariably arrives when I'm feeling sluggish and thick. My knees and hips creak, and I have a bottle of Aleve in every bag. No matter what—no matter how many steps I take, no matter how dedicated to my FitBit I am, no matter how much yoga I do, no matter how often I go to the gym, no matter how much I cut out wine or sugar or infrequent potatoes—my weight travels along a five pound continuum: sometimes I'm up, sometimes I'm down. Like my mother when she was pregnant, I gauge change by how tight my rings are. On the days when I can't get them off, I don't go to see her; I don't tell her why.

Recently, she came to stay for Passover and Easter; I saved my beloved matzo brei—the crack cocaine of my people, which I make once a year—for the breakfast after our seder. That morning, we sat at my dining room table while she drank a cup of hot water and watched me lift my fork to my mouth; she glared violently at it, and me, like we were the devil incarnate. I pushed myself away from the table and took my plate into the kitchen; I stood at the sink and ate with my back to her, hidden from view.